GREAT
BAy, St. Martin (May 1, 2004)—On
April 29, 2004, Lt. Gov. Franklyn Richards presented the St.
Martin poet/author Lasana M. Sekou with a knighthood that was
conferred by Queen Beatrix of the Dutch kingdom on March 16,
2004.

“We hope that news of this award to Sekou
for his work, especially in literature, will inspire more St.
Martiners to write deeply and creatively about St. Martin,”
said Jacqueline Sample, president of House of Nehesi Publishers.
The royal decorations constitute the kingdom’s highest
national awards and are awarded annually for merit and
outstanding community service in the Netherlands and in its
remaining colonies in the Caribbean.

“This award could also encourage those who
are writing or who have a book to continue putting more faith,
time, and creativity in building the St. Martin literature by
researching, writing, and getting their books published.”
Sekou is the projects director of House of Nehesi, which has
published most of St. Martin’s writers and world-famous
authors from the Caribbean and the USA such as George Lamming,
Kamau Brathwaite, and Amiri Baraka.

“House of Nehesi would like to see more
books not only about our culture and history, but also about the
St. Martin experience in business, education, sports, law,
government leadership, tourism, traditional and modern medicine,
immigration, agriculture and animal husbandry, science and
infrastructural development and so on,” said Sample

In media interviews following the
royal decorations ceremony to the 12 St. Martiners at the Lt.
Governor’s Mansion in Little Bay, Sekou thanked Lt. Governor
Richards, the territory’s decorations committee (RODAC), which
organizes the selection, nomination, and presentation process,
and the Dutch sovereign that directs the approval and conferring
process. The poet also congratulated his fellow recipients.
Former St. Martin Lt. Gov. Dennis Richardson, with the award
title of “Officer,” was conferred the highest rank (of the
three categories of awards for St. Martin this year) followed by
three knights, and eight recipients of the medal of “member of
the Order of Oranje-Nassau.”

Sekou said that he would continue writing
about “the core cultural values of the St. Martin nation,
about the unity and progress of the island and its people, the
Caribbean liberation and integration process, and political
independence for St. Martin.”

The poet “dedicated” the award to “the
folks of my father’s and mother’s generation who sent us to
school with that traditional sense of pride to do better for
ourselves, our families, and for St. Martin but never to betray
the St. Martin nation.”

Sekou sees the royal decorations today in St.
Martin as “a step” to when “an independent St. Martin will
have its own highest national award. Then the Netherlands’
royal decorations and St. Martin’s national award might be
granted by each country to their own and each other’s citizens
in, for example, a category such as the promotion of friendship,
cooperation, and cultural exchange between both sovereign
nations based on mutual understand and coexistence.”

The
hard cover book, a primer about St.
Martin’s culture, historical
personalities and natural environment,
is listed on the US government
department’s Bureau of
Administration website. “We think this
is a good thing to share with the St.
Martin people,” said Sekou. “In fact,
House of Nehesi is firstly thankful to
the St. Martin people for continuing to
read, enjoy and study this book.
“Having National Symbols listed as
recommended reading in the IPS section
of the US State Department adds to the
venues where folks abroad can be put in
touch with original material about St.
Martin and the St. Martin people.” The
material from the book continues to be
used for popular events such as
carnival, for research by scholars, as
teaching material in schools, and for
presentations by government and tourism
departments, churches and civic groups.

Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy."

Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits.

Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly

The use of the nation’s
mother language, “the way we speak naturally on both parts
of our island, is the sweetness to the ear and the heart of
Miss Yaya’s spoken word, storytelling, and talks about St.
Martin’s folkways,” said Jacqueline Sample, president of
House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP). Richards had completed
working on The Frock with HNP at the time of her death at
age 55, on May 26, 2010 – about four months before the book
was published. The plan to launch the
book on the UNESCO-declared day in 2011 came out of meetings
between the culture department, the publisher, and Yaya’s
family representatives Priscille Figaro, Adrienne Richards,
and Laurellye Benjamin.

“We need to recognize
our artists like Yaya who are working so hard for our people
and our identity,” said Dormoy. “It’s an honor to be
involved with this book as part of Yaya’s legacy that can
live on, and to launch The Frock in connection with the
International Mother Language Day,” said Dormoy.

Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection.